Contest aims to draw people closer to a river

10/08/09 8:38AM
Jill Kaufman

(Host) At 400 miles
long, the Connecticut River is one of the biggest water bodies in our region,
stretching from Canada to Long Island Sound.

It starts out narrow
enough to leap across and widens into a broad estuary. People today water ski and kayak on the Connecticut, but raw sewage is still dumped in places. And in many communities people are cut off
from the river by Interstate 91 or railroad tracks.

A group of river
enthusiasts is trying to draw people closer to the river in an unusual way. As
part of a collaboration with Northeast public radio stations, WFCR's Jill
Kaufman reports on a Connecticut
River song-writing contest.

(Kaufman) It's several
hours into a long night of music at The Rapids, a restaurant in Huntington, Massachusetts. A contestant
takes the stage in the Connecticut River Watershed Council's songwriting
contest.

(Singer: "New England's longest
waterway..." fade banjo under)

(Kaufman) While
there's not a single Grammy winner in the group, a couple of the judges have connections to Hollywood, and one is the grandson of the great 20th century radio
star -- Eddie Cantor.

Three singers will be
selected tonight to compete in the finals later this month. But why are council staff doing the work of
American Idol talent scouts? The
council's Pat Lamountain says she's
trying to get a message out, without
causing people's eyes to glaze over.

(Lamountain) "We do all the things about dams,
all the permits, or just testing the
water for bacteria. I mean I mean they don't necessarily not want to know they
don‘t want to hear it -- in the way we
usually present it."

(Kaufman) So tonight
they're hearing it in a different way. The theme for the contest is "living
along the river." And one writer started at the river's headwaters in New Hampshire where the Connecticut starts as a series of lakes.

(John Michael Field) "We was dragging on the stream at
Connecticut lakes with a
Belgian team...."

(Kaufman) Fourth-grade
teacher John Michael Field from Wilbraham, Massachusetts wrote about logging along the river in the late 1800s...

(Field) "Tom would sluice the frozen slopes, snubbing
the horses with an icy rope. He moved more spruce than a man could dream. He
never lost a sled he was the best I'd seen..."

Conn. Public Radio

(Kaufman) Vermont did once have a massive red spruce forest. UMass biologist Ed Klekowski says when it was chopped down,
the Connecticut turned into a river of wood.

(Klekowski) That cutting began in about 1870. And they
would drive these logs all the way down to sawmills in Northampton and in, uh, Holyoke. It's about
a 300 mile drive."

(Kaufman) Using the Connecticut to send logs down stream didn't last long. But
there's always been farming. And yet Klekowski say back then the farmers didn't
always treated the river well.

(Klekowski) "The farmers along the river Connecticut
River used the Connecticut as a garbage
dump. They would bring their horses filled with whatever refuse they had and
then dump it off the banks. In addition,
to farmers dumping garbage, every industry along the Connecticut
River was venting its spores, so to speak, into the waters.
And so before the Clean Water Act, the river was really pretty foul."

(Kaufman) Federal
clean water legislation in the 1960s and 70s gave the Connecticut-- a chance to renew.

(Elizabeth Farnsworth) "What I find so wonderful about
this river is that you can be within a quarter mile of some of the dense, most
densely populated areas, and when you're out in the middle of this river, you
hardly know it."

(Kaufman) Ecologist
Elizabeth Farnsworth of the New England Wildflower Society is standing on the
banks of the Connecticut in Northfield, Massachusetts. She's kayaked the entire length of the river and has
seen bald eagles soar over Hartford.
But she says the river offers something more than access to nature.

(Farnsworth) "Look at it now. It's clear, it's clean.
You wouldn't drink out of it necessarily. But it has really recovered in a
remarkable way. So when I get on this river and think about how resilient the
system is, it really gives me hope."

(Kaufman) Hope, but
not illusion. She and other river stewards know it will take more than a song
to protect the Connecticut.

For VPR News, I'm Jill
Kaufman

(Host) Northeast
environmental coverage is part of NPR's Local News Initiative. The reporting is
funded, in part, by a grant from United Technologies.